What Is Amazon Mechanical Turk?

Amazon Mechanical Turk (in this article I may also use the name AMT or MTurk)is an Internet marketplace where you individuals can accomplish a little task to earn money. On the other side, the businesses offer their jobs for freelancers. Notice that you won’t be working for Amazon on this website unlike you may think because of its name.

The website is owned by Amazon but jobs are offered by other businesses. Tasks are by nature usually something fast and as my friend likes to call them “ape jobs” which means that anyone is able to do them.

Still, tasks are something that couldn’t be accomplished by the computer but they require human intelligence. Let’s have a look at the tasks more in detail in the next chapter.

How Does Amazon Mechanical Turk Work?

The process of making money on AMT is pretty simple. This is how they represent it on their homepage:

1.Find an Interesting Task 2.Work 3.Earn Money

At this point, you are probably asking, “Well, what kind of tasks do they offer on MTurk?” There are many kinds of tasks:

At this point, you may probably guess that the reward of completing this kind of tasks isn’t very good. I have reviewed more than 80 so-called get-paid-to (GPT) sites that pay money for accomplishing these mini-jobs. Guess how many of them I am still using? 0.

How Much Can You Earn on Amazon Mechanical Turk?

Let me show a few examples of available jobs. There is all the time hundreds or even thousands of tasks (on MTurk they call them HITs) available.

In the picture above you can see an example of one of the highest paying HITs at the moment. The requester promises to pay $4,63 reward for transcribing an audio which is 17 minutes and 9 seconds long. If you have transcribed audios, you know that it takes usually at least 5 times more to transcribe the audio than its actual length is.

So, if you are a fast transcriber you could do this task in 90 minutes. Then your hourly salary would be around $3. Remember also that the salary of this job was in the upper-end scale of MTurk. Let me show you the highest paying job at the moment:

The highest paying available job on Amazon Mechanical Turk at the moment.

The job is for a video captioner and it pays $83,97 for the video that length is almost 4 hours. To be honest, I don’t have personal experience of video captioning but I took a look at how much video captioners earn on average. The average salary for a captioner in the U.S in 2014 was $58,000.

We can quickly calculate that for captioning this 4-hour video you can reach even close to a typical salary of a captioner. Another thing we need to consider is that captioning videos really takes time. Experts say that if you are fast, you can caption a 2-minute video in 10 minutes. So, this 4-hour video would take at least 20 hours. This makes your hourly salary around $4.

MTurk Earnings in One Month

Let me show you an example of one person who has been working on MTurk.

This person has been enjoying working on MTurk and his earnings have been $150-250 with only “little effort”. However, we can assume that his salary is way below the minimum salary in the U.S. as our calculations showed before.

Most people report that they are earning $1-5 per hour on MTurk.

Therefore, I can’t really recommend wasting your time. I use a website One Hour Translation to earn $20-40 per hour as a translator but I think that building your own online business is even more profitable in the long run.

Amazon Mechanical Turk Cash Out

You can cash out immediately when you have reached the low $1 cash out limit. There are two ways to get your money:

Take money to your bank account. It takes usually 3-4 days to transfer.

Transfer money into Amazon gift cards.

There are tens of Amazon Mechanical Turk reviews on the Internet and among them have been many complaints. Let’s have a look at the most common ones.

Amazon Mechanical Turk Complaints

Even though the screenshot above showed that somebody has enjoyed using MTurk it seems that most people aren’t satisfied with the earnings.

1.”Low Earnings”

This worker approximated earnings to be 20-75 cents per hour on MTurk.

Linda explains that MTurk jobs could be worth it in third-world countries but they aren’t available there.

2.”I Couldn’t Accomplish Tasks”

Mark says MTurk is just a joke. The majority of tasks don’t work.

3.Is MTurk Safe?

Some people also pointed out that accomplishing all tasks isn’t safe because you need to give your credit card details and other information. You should always use common sense and follow my 5 tips to avoid scams.

I’ll give you a few additional tips that will help not being scammed on MTurk:

Don’t give your credit card information unless you are 100% that the requester is reliable.

Avoid jobs that promise huge earnings. As we saw above, most of them pay maximum $4 per hour. If some job would promise $10 per hour, you need to be extremely careful because it may be a scam.

If you are suspicious, you can ask other workers on Turker Nation or on MTurk Forum what they think.

Conclusion – Is MTurk a Scam Or Legit?

Amazon Mechanical Turk is not a scam but I don’t recommend this website because there are 10-50 times better-paying opportunities out there.

My #1 recommendation, especially for beginners, is Wealthy Affiliate. I started their training some years ago without any experience of affiliate marketing but I can say that it changed my life. Their support, tools, and training taught me step-by-step how I can earn money online. It has allowed me to quit my 9-5 job and start traveling the world.

I want to remind that making big money online doesn’t happen overnight. It requires work and effort but when you succeed in the long run it’s way more profitable than sticking to an average 9-5 job.

Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!

Roope is the founder and creator of YourOnlineRevenue.com. He has created this website in 2015 to help you to create a successful online business.
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us by leaving a comment below! We hope you enjoy!

12 Comments

While there are better money making opportunities out there, mturk actually isn’t such a bad way to earn a little extra money. There are plenty of forums and subreddits dedicated to sharing links to reliable mturk tasks that require very little effort and time to complete. They may not be the best paying jobs, but if you have a few minutes to spare it’s a nice way to earn some extra pocket money.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is very legit and I like your review about it. I had an interest in joining it but my application got denied. I am still happy to know it is a legit site and I would encourage members from accepted countries to join it.

Why would you encourage people to join MTurk when they have much better opportunities out there?

I always ask people, would you prefer earning $1-5 per hour or $50 per hour? If you answer $1-5 per hour, I don’t understand it :D. If the answer is $50 per hour, then you should stay away from sites like MTurk.

I see. Overall, earnings on MTurk or similar freelance programs are much lower compared to doing something more profitable like affiliate marketing. 2 days ago I earned $435 in 5 minutes with affiliate marketing 😀

There was one time that I really wanted to try Mechanical Turk and I tried to register. They said that I should wait for a confirmation email that will verify that I can start working. A few hours later, an email came and it says that I can not be able to work on their site and they cannot tell me the reason why.

I was confused and tried searching online why I did not qualify. I found out that Mechanical Turk is not accepting freelancers from my country which is quite disappointing. I would like to try it just to see how it works, but I can’t.

Hello, my name is Roope Kiuttu and I am the founder of Your Online Revenue. I am a regular guy from Finland who travels around the world while making my living online. On this website, I am going to teach YOU how to make money online. You can get quickly started with this step-by-step training (20 FREE lessons available).